Posted on

The Great Mind Challenge 2012 – An Exciting Journey

When I saw an update today on the pages that I had been monitoring for the last few weeks, and realized that it had been an entire year since we conceived the idea of our project, an indescribable feeling ran through me. It was roughly around 15th September last year when four students from our college had come together and decided to participate in IBM TGMC 2012 and test our skills against teams from all over the nation. At that time, it was merely a concept, slowly taking its shape before any actual work could begin. And today, it has been a year, and only a week since the final round results of the contest were announced, and to our extreme delight, we were declared to be amongst the winners! Let me start from the beginning… Continue reading “The Great Mind Challenge 2012 – An Exciting Journey”

Posted on

Facebook rolls out Embeddable Posts to all users

 

Facebook announced that it was testing Embeddable posts earlier in July. This would enable users to share posts on the popular social network not only across the network but on any webpage. Initially the feature was rolled out to a few publications and pages, and after refining it considering feedback, Facebook is finally rolling out the feature to all users. Continue reading “Facebook rolls out Embeddable Posts to all users”

Posted on

Chat with your Google contacts from Outlook.com

Email used to be once a very important part of what we called the Internet. And it is indeed one of the essence of this vast network, which still holds much importance even today when many of us are more comfortable sending short pieces of information via IM services and direct messaging clients like Facebook, BBM, and WhatsApp! Keeping this in mind, many software giants are providing chat clients embedded into their web-based email services. Google recently introduced Hangouts which replaces the older Google Talk; Microsoft recently started retiring its Messenger client, merging it with Skype; Yahoo! provides Yahoo! messenger, and so on.

Till a few days ago, Outlook.com, the renovated Hotmail service, used to allow users to chat with Messenger and Facebook contacts. Recently, the ability to chat with Google contacts was added. So, if you want to chat with your contacts on your Google account from Outlook.com,

Continue reading “Chat with your Google contacts from Outlook.com”

Posted on

Switching Network type in Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 Preview has just been released to the public, and in case you have installed this preview build on your machine, chances are you might have observed that some software (especially security suites) that were working perfectly in your Windows 8 machine won’t work here. It is quite normal for third-party security companies to not support beta operating systems, as the code is not final, and is subject to change. A security suite is dependent on various internal parts of the OS, and so it will take Windows 8.1 to be released to manufacturing before they are officially supported by security giants like Kaspersky and ESET. So, like it or not, for the time being, security freaks will have to do with Windows Defender and Windows Firewall.

That might be okay for quite many people who want to test a beta OS in the first place. But if you are concerned about security and have set your network type to private, then Continue reading “Switching Network type in Windows 8.1”

Posted on

How to resume a failed download in Mozilla Firefox from the previous position

Nowadays, many of us use integrated download managers to download files of large sizes. As it is quite expected that such downloads might take quite some amount of time on typical household connections, support for pausing and resuming the download is quite important.

In modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox 22, Google Chrome 29, Internet Explorer 10, this feature is built in. However, when downloading files from servers which do not allow downloading using the same link after a certain period of time, effectively leads to the downloads getting cancelled over low-bandwidth connections if they are paused in between. Download may also fail because of many other reasons like power failure, network error, etc.

Anyway, so when it does fail using Firefox, resuming might cause the download to be restarted. Here I’ll share a simple workaround to get around this. Continue reading “How to resume a failed download in Mozilla Firefox from the previous position”

Posted on

Watch the Build 2013 keynote at 9 pm IST today

The Build 2013 keynote will begin at 9 am PT (which is 9:30 pm in India) today and can be viewed over on Channel 9.

Apart from launching Windows 8.1 Preview, Microsoft will share the latest updates and talk about what’s next for Windows, Windows Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio and more in Build 2013, which takes place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco starting today until June 28. Additional event information will be available at https://www.buildwindows.com/.

Posted on

Everything you need to know about Windows 8.1

Windows 8 was built for a world where touch is a first class interaction model, and where highly mobile innovative and diverse devices take the fore-front. With only a bit more than seven months into this new, bold approach to computing, Microsoft is set to release an update for Windows 8, which was being developed under the codename “Windows Blue” as Windows 8.1, later this year.

According to Microsoft, this new update will advance the ideas and vision behind Windows 8, while taking customer feedback into account. Windows 8.1 will be adding new features and functionality in key areas like personalization, search, built-in apps, Windows Store experience, and cloud connectivity. This update will be available to existing Windows 8 users for free though the Windows Store! With less than a week before Windows 8.1 preview is made available to the public, let us have a look at some upcoming changes. Continue reading “Everything you need to know about Windows 8.1”

Posted on

Deciphering Sherlock’s Hidden Messages

I have always been quite a fan of detective and suspense stories. Be it Hercule Poirot created by Agatha Christie, or our very own Feluda conceived by Satyajit Ray, they all bring new flavours and styles in crime fiction. Nonetheless, Sherlock Holmes created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is my top favourite. I read most of Holmes’ stories during my childhood, and his ability to deduce so much information from the tiniest of clues leaves us speechless. Recent Hollywood movies starring Robert Downey Jr. were quite an excellent tribute to Doyle’s famous detective.

We all know about Sherlock Holmes of 221 B, Baker Street, and his adventures in the Victorian period. But could he be able to showcase his talent in the modern world where information about the remotest corner of the world is available at our fingertips? Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis came up with the idea of adapting Holmes’s stories in the backdrop of today’s high-tech world. Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Sherlock uses modern technology, such as texting, the Internet, and GPS, to solve crimes. Sherlock has his own website The Science of Deduction, https://www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk.

Among the various posts he makes on the sites to interact with clients and criminals alike, Holmes writes on a section called “Hidden messages” where he apparently shared some encrypted messages sent to him. In this post, I’d like to share my analysis of how to decipher the secret messages from this ciphers.

Continue reading “Deciphering Sherlock’s Hidden Messages”